FUNERAL AFTER PARTY

Comic book pages that are good.

[funeralafterparty]

BETTER better than darkness is fake darkness which swindles you into necking with someone’s antique cousin better than banks are false banks where you change all your rough money into legal tender better than coffee is blue coffee which you drink in your last bath or sometimes waiting for your shoes to be dismantled better than poetry is my poetry which refers to everything that is beautiful and dignified, but is neither of these itself better than wild is secretly wild as when I am in the darkness of a parking space with a new snake better than art is repulsive art which demonstrates better than scripture the tiny measure of your improvement better than darkness is darkless which is inkier, vaster more profound and eerily refrigerated filled with caves and blinding tunnels in which appear beckoning dead relatives and other religious paraphernalia better than love is wuve which is more refined superbly erotic tiny serene people with huge genitalia but lighter than thought comfortably installed on an eyelash of mist and living grimly ever after cooking, gardening and raising kids better than my mother is your mother who is still alive while mine is not alive but what am I saying! forgive me mother better than me are you kinder than me are you sweeter smarter faster you you you prettier than me stronger than me lonelier than me I want to get to know you better and better

Leonard Cohen

[funeralafterparty]

Black Dahlia Revisited

re-read James Ellroy's The Black Dahlia for my first book of the year. 

1: This book is way better than I remembered. 

2: Joyce Carol Oates' claim that Ellroy is the American Dostoevsky seemed hilarious and insane like all things she says to me the first time I read it but it might not be that far off, the beauty of Ellroy's (extremely flawed, very bad people) heroes is that their heroic deeds do not absolve them of their sins, their final submission to romantic love does (obviously for Fyodor this would be religious love but God doesn't exist in America).

3: This book is literally about a crime-solving polycule.

[funeralafterparty]

She nods out in the toilet once or twice, and if she dreams at all, it’s hard to separate from the great invisible wheeling around her, decelerating, board-fading to all-but-silent black and white, till it’s time at last to CD tilde home. For recessional music there’s “Closing Time” by Semisonic, a four-chord farewell to the old century. Former and future nerdistocracy slowly, and to look at them you’d think reluctantly, filtering back out into the street, into the long September which has been with them in a virtual way since spring before last, continuing only to deepen. Putting their street faces back on for it. Faces already under silent assault, as if by something ahead, some Y2K of the workweek that no one is quite imagining, the crowds drifting slowly out into the little legendary streets, the highs beginning to dissipate, out into the casting-off of veils before the luminosities of dawn, a sea of T-shirts nobody’s reading, a clamor of messages nobody’s getting, as if it’s the true text history of nights in the Alley, outcries to be attended to and not be lost, the 3:00 AM kozmo deliveries to code sessions and all-night shredding parties, the bedfellows who came and went, the bands in the clubs, the songs whose hooks still wait to ambush an idle hour, the day jobs with meetings about meetings and bosses without clue, the unreal strings of zeros, the business models changing one minute to the next, the start-up parties every night of the week and more on Thursdays than you could keep track of, which of these faces so claimed by the time, the epoch whose end they’ve been celebrating all night—which of them can see ahead, among the microclimates of binary, tracking earthwide everywhere through dark fiber and twisted pairs and nowadays wirelessly through spaces private and public, anywhere among cybersweatshop needles flashing and never still, in that unquiet vastly stitched and unstitched tapestry they have all at some time sat growing crippled in the service of—to the shape of the day imminent, a procedure waiting execution, about to be revealed, a search result with no instructions on how to look for it?

Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

[funeralafterparty]

[funeralafterparty]

It only took 10 minutes after I found out Bowie was dead for me to see a tweet about how he deserved to die because he was probably a fascist. After Bowie, the greatest lost of the 21st century is “nuance.”

[funeralafterparty]

Tim’s Tips: Girls are cool and nice and smart, but they also all know this special move so be careful!!!

[ndrmag]

The Mountain Goats’ John Darnielle Is All About Candy Crush

(D.L. Anderson)

NDR’s Social Media Director Tim Jones had the opportunity to sit down last week with John Darnielle, the singer-songwriter of The Mountain Goats and author of the novel Wolf In White Van. The interview took place at the Red Cat Café in Birmingham, AL after a packed Mountain Goats show the night before. Presented here are some excerpts from the interview, in which Darnielle geeks out pretty hard regarding his Facebook game habits and least favorite Street Fighter characters, and gives some perspective on how arguing on the internet has evolved from the days of Usenet to the Twitter epoch. The full interview will appear in the Winter issue of NDR, out this December.

Tim Jones: Much of [Wolf in White Van] revolves around by-mail roleplaying games. When I was at Bowling Green State University I learned that the library there actually has a sizeable archive of people mailing back and forth their moves in games to each other.

John Darnielle: No kidding? Oh wow. Is it online? I gotta look into that. I don’t see myself getting out to Bowling Green any time soon, but that would be hip. Gee whiz.

TJ: People played chess by mail, roleplaying games, board games like Risk.

JD: In all the major papers, they used to, or may still have, descriptions of chess games. There’d be a board that would say, “Here’s your board, the last three moves were this.”

TJ: I’ve always been terrible at RPGs. Despite wanting to play them, I have no imagination for doing things unless I have choices presented to me. Given the choice to do anything, I do nothing.

JD: D&D is all about that though. It’s pretty rigid, like, “What do you do? Roll for initiative. There you go.” The last campaign I played was all battle. Warhammer’s another one: you don’t have to be terribly imaginative. You can be, but it’s not required.

TJ: I can’t even play open world video games because of that same problem.

“I have become that which every game playing person fears: I just play Facebook games. Candy Crush Soda, Candy Crush Saga, Monsters Blasters, Monster Blasters Hexablast. Mainly Monster Blasters, I have to say.”

JD: I have become that which every game playing person fears: I just play Facebook games.

TJ: Which ones!?

JD: Candy Crush Soda, Candy Crush Saga, Monsters Blasters, Monster Blasters Hexablast. Mainly Monster Blasters, I have to say.

TJ: I read a great article on The Verge that talked about how Facebook game companies are borrowing from slot machine manufactures to keep you playing.

JD: It’s a time killer. My son likes Monster Blasters too.

TJ: My brother is a competitive Street Fighter player.

JD: Oh no kidding. Who’s his character?

TJ: In Street Fighter 4 he plays a character called Poison.

JD: Oh Street Fighter 4, I don’t know any of those guys. I’m just glad it’s not Ken or Ryu. I hate those guys. Guile too. I don’t like Guile. That was the least of the silver flashball evils.

TJ: He was a Balrog for a little while.

JD: Oh, that’s my guy!

TJ: There was a particular moment in time on Twitter when guys like @regisl were around—you remember him, the pyramid guy?

JD: Oh, from San Diego right? Yeah that guy was cool. I met him. He was a sweet guy.

TJ: I felt like that was a cool moment when “weird twitter” had run into this positive spiritualism. It was when Night Vale started up. Just a great time to be online. Why do you think you use Twitter so much?

JD: I don’t know. Everybody likes to talk about social media, but I don’t. I think overthinking what you’re doing is a mistake. I mean, you should be aware of your choices and stuff but… One thing I like about Twitter is I’m not using it to live blog my life. If I want to do that, Livejournal is still out there. I can go get a Livejournal, or Diaryland, or whatever. Diaryland: old, old platform. They’re still around! It’s still free. I had one years ago, and I looked at it, none of the people I followed had updated since over a year ago. But talking about Twitter, it’s golden goose stuff, you know? It’s there, and my computer’s open all the time anyway.

TJ: It’s fun to tell jokes!

“But you see these guys who really want to do this war of attrition style of argument, and say, ‘Who will give up?’ and want to see some guy beat into submission, but who has been persuaded of any position on Twitter?”

JD: Yeah, that’s what it’s useful for. If you’re into being positive on it, it’s like a therapeutic exercise. If someone wants to pick a fight with you, come on. I’m not gonna fight with people in public, only politicians!

TJ: Doesn’t happen to me often, but I’m sure it does for you.

JD: Yeah, I tweet a lot of pro-choice stuff. People want to argue. They say, “Let me ask you this,” and, dude, if your tweet starts with “Let me ask you this,” and it’s not a joke, you are not understanding Twitter! But you see these guys who really want to do this war of attrition style of argument, and say, “Who will give up?” and want to see some guy beat into submission, but who has been persuaded of any position on Twitter?

The thing is, what is interesting about it is that in the Ur-days of the internet there was Usenet. There was this hierarchy of newsgroups and people didn’t have character limits. Well, people now use TwitLonger anyway and write you this big giant essay. But back then you would see these nested responses. If you went to the archives of alt, the one where they talk about evolution, people who have doctorates in anthropology but are creationists would show up to argue. Alt.vegetarian had a troll from Montana who I remember to this day would show up to argue that it was catastrophic to the human body to not eat meat. Smart guy with too much time on his hands. But it’s an expression of something that’s been around as long as we’ve been online.

John Darnielle is a writer, composer, guitarist, and vocalist for the band the Mountain Goats; he is widely considered one of the best lyricists of his generation. He lives in Durham, North Carolina, with his family and is the author of the novel Wolf in White Van. You can follow him at johndarnielle.tumblr.com and at @mountain_goats.

Tim Jones is Ph.D student in the English department at LSU. He holds a Master’s in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University and is from Ocean Springs, Mississippi.

[funeralafterparty]

Hey here’s a piece of an interview I conducted with John Darnielle from the Mountain Goats wow

[saccharinescorpion]

this is a book

[pyramidslayer]

and people say there’s no modern great american novel

[timfastic-deactivated20190813]

Weird how this has an in-joke from 1993 as the tag line. 

[funeralafterparty]

Also “how could plumbers bring our country to a halt” is a Nixon gag?

[cartoonpolitics]

[danielle-mertina]

I don’t get this because white millennials love that flag too. Have y'all seen Twitter, IG, and any other form of social media?

[mahjinbae-deactivated20151231]

young southerners are JUST as racist as their parents???

[whaticantremembernow]

Like did the ‘young southerners’ raise themselves or??

[drewdrewyou]

as a young southerner I can say that the majority of us are WAY more accepting and tolerant than our parents. 

[rinnysega]

Sometimes I wonder if these people who don’t live in the south realize there are young white southerners who fight tooth and nail with their kinfolk about this issue. As a southern white person who gets called a traitor by her family, I completely relate to this picture and fuck anyone who tries to paint us as the bigots we are trying hard to fight against!

[twinklylightslongshiftnights]

I have family in Texas- my uncle is the biggest republican I’ve ever met- anti-LGBT rights, pro-racism, pro-gun, anti-woman-but his daughter, my cousin, is the COMPLETE opposite, and she doesn’t hide it either. She spends her days in the schools gay rights group, has taken part in dozens of rallies, and regularly argues with her father about what she believes in. She is the next generation of southerner, and I HATE that she is being portrayed and generalised as a bigot.

[callmejude]

Man, tumblr is a trip. Never generalize anyone about anything unless it’s someone who isn’t you, amirite? Look, I get this shit from a lot of people. I get it from movies and television, I get it from my own friends. I’m not saying the south isn’t a shit place some of the time. It is. That’s the thing. We know it is. We’re trying to change it. This is the comment that got me:

“Like did the ‘young southerners’ raise themselves or???” 

No, and that’s literally the point. Do you see the same comic I do? That kid dragging himself out of the sinkhole? You get what that’s supposed to mean, right? We didn’t raise ourselves. He’s been living in that sinkhole up to this point, too. Because we grow up believing our parents know what they’re talking about. We all do, I know that isn’t any different up north. And it’s great that your parents weren’t racist, homophobic bigots like so many southern parents were, but the whole point the comic is trying to make is how fucking hard it is realizing your parents aren’t trustworthy people. It fucking sucks. I have to fight the man who raised me about what my own rights should be.

And the fact of the matter is, that for years, because my dad said otherwise, I didn’t think I deserved any. And it was a fucking nightmare pulling myself out of that sinkhole and coming out and being who I am today. I still struggle with a lot of issues because of things I grew up hearing from my southern stereotype father.

It’s exhausting seeing people looking shocked or frightened when I mention I’m from Texas, but even more exhausting is understanding why they have that look on their face. It’s humiliating having to explain that my roots don’t define me. But I’m not who my father is, and I’m certainly not who he wants me to be.

So yeah, I’m done having people tell me what I think. And if I’m not going to take it from my own flesh and blood you better be damn sure I’m not gonna take it from the likes of some strangers on the Internet.

[pelvicsorcery90]

Possibly worth noting more about how he still has one foot in the sinkhole, still dripping with the stink. Pretty decent political cartoon overall. It doesn’t pretend he is on a hill all daisyfresh from the crud he was born into. He is struggling out of it and still affected by his upbringing. I don’t personally know any decent Southerners, but I know people who are on their way to overcoming the racist crap they were indoctrinated with. I imagine it is similar.

[karilotl-deactivated20240706]

hey can we also stop pretending racism is exclusively endemic to the south, that’d be swell

[funeralafterparty]

Also worth pointing out that this cartoonist, Andy Marlette, is the nephew of the late Doug Marlette, who drew the newspaper cartoon Kudzu which was pretty center right generally so it’s almost like people’s ideas can be different across generations.

[funeralafterparty]

Palepoli by Usamaru Furuya

[abbs-of-fuckin-steel-deactivate]

[funeralafterparty]

MUSCLE CROWE

[funeralafterparty]

season 2 of true detective is so silly and so awesome. really laying bare how absurd pizzolatto’s writing is without an actor as committed as mcconaughey.

[eggoid]

What movie was #1 at the box office when you were born?

I PROTEST AGAINST HAVING PLANET OF THE APES

[funeralafterparty]

Pretty Woman, #1 in it’s EIGHTH WEEK OF RELEASE!

[tvmovieart]

[funeralafterparty]

“hrm.” - Richard Harrow, greatest television character.

[wedigfilmposters]

White God (2014)

Thirteen-year-old Lili fights to protect her dog Hagen. She is devastated when her father eventually sets Hagen free on the streets. Still innocently believing love can conquer any difficulty, Lili sets out to find her dog and save him.

Director:  Kornél Mundruczó Writers:  Kornél Mundruczó (screenplay), Viktória Petrányi(screenplay). Stars:  Zsófia Psotta, Sándor Zsótér, Lili Horváth Poster Designed by Gravillis Inc.

[funeralafterparty]

this movie was sooooo coooool

[biggreedyeyes-blog-blog]

L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970)

@Broadway Cinema Screen 2

[funeralafterparty]

Argento does the Vertigo staircase shot with a triangle staircase in Bird With the Crystal Plumage.

[manuelealtieri]

Schifo. 

[funeralafterparty]

"if everything sucks, then you die.”